Godfather (44 page)

The film segues seamlessly from documentary-like portrayals of the youngsters' shabby lives in a dead-end, poverty-trap slum to the dramatic tragedy in which Dallas, who has freaked out after Johnny's death, becomes a dazed, ruined presence. Coppola is adept at depicting the alienation so characteristic of the youth subculture.
The Outsiders
in the last analysis is a downbeat, unpatronizing tale about brutalized teens, marked by inspired naturalism of both dialogue and performance.

Not the least of the movie's virtues is the host of consistently excellent performances that Coppola drew from his appealing young cast, who graduated into starring roles in a number of youth-oriented pictures: Tom Cruise (
Risky Business
), Patrick Swayze (
Dirty Dancing
), Emilio Estevez (
The Breakfast Club
), Matt Dillon (
Drugstore Cowboy
), C. Thomas Howell (
RedDawn
), and Ralph Macchio (
The Karate Kid
).

After the overwhelming problems Coppola encountered in financing and marketing
One from the Heart
, some critics found it refreshing to encounter a Coppola film that, bless it, was only a conventional genre picture about teenage rebellion. What's more, the youth audience took the picture to their hearts. The film earned $12 million in its first two weeks in release and eventually reaped $100 million in profits, which helped to put some cash in the coffers at Zoetrope.
The Outsiders
generated just enough money “to help me at a time when I needed some big bucks,” says Coppola.
²³

The Outsiders
subsequently spawned a TV miniseries in the spring of 1991. It premiered with a ninety-minute pilot that picked up where the 1983 movie left off. The pilot opens with footage from Coppola's movie of Dallas being shot by the police, followed by Dallas's funeral. Afterward, a welfare worker warns Ponyboy (Jay Ferguson) and Sodapop (Rodney Harvey) that if they participate in any more rumbles between the greasers and the socs they will be taken away from the custody of their older brother Darrel and placed in foster homes. The pilot was followed by seven weekly installments. Coppola supervised the series, but he did not direct any of the episodes.

After finishing the feature film of
The Outsiders
, Coppola followed it immediately with the screen adaptation of another Hinton novel. While he was shooting
The Outsiders
in Tulsa, Coppola got the idea that he would like to employ the same crew and locations for a second teen movie. As Hinton tells it, “Halfway through
The Outsiders
, Francis looked up at me one day and said, ‘Susie, we get along great. Have you written anything else I can film?' I told him about
Rumble Fish
, and he read the book and loved it.
He said, ‘I know what we can do. On our Sundays off, let's write a screenplay, and then as soon as we can wrap
The Outsiders
, we'll take a two-week break and start filming
Rumble Fish
.' I said ‘Sure, Francis, we're working 16 hours a day, and you want to spend Sundays writing another screenplay?' But that's what we did.”
²⁴

In the novel, Rusty-James, a disadvantaged teenager from a broken home, looks up to his older brother, who is known only as Motorcycle Boy, the leader of a local gang. The relationship of the two brothers struck a chord in Coppola. His brother August, who is five years his senior, included young Francis in his activities and provided a strong role model for him when they were growing up. August Coppola “was my idol,” Francis Coppola says, “just took me everywhere when he went out with the guys because he was the leader of the gang,” which was called the Wild Deuces. “He always looked out for me.”
²⁵
A dedication to August Coppola, who eventually became a college professor, appears in the end credits of
Rumble Fish
: “To August Coppola, my first and best teacher.” As it happened, Coppola hired August's son Nicolas to play a gang member named Smokey in
Rumble Fish
, but Nicolas Coppola took the professional name of Nicolas Cage in order to obscure the family connection with the director of the film. Still, in the movie Nicolas Cage wore a copy of his father's own jacket from high school days, with Wild Deuces displayed on the back.

Coppola planned to go from one film right into the other. The piggybacked production of the two Hinton movie adaptations recalled the circumstances of his shooting
Dementia 13
twenty years before. After Roger Corman finished shooting
The Young Racers
in Europe, Coppola convinced Corman to let him make
Dementia 13
back-to-back with the racing picture, since the expenses involved in transporting the crew and technical equipment to Europe had already been accounted for (see
chapter 1
). Similarly, Coppola reasoned that he could make
Rumble Fish
with the same production team and equipment he had assembled in Tulsa for
The Outsiders
.

Never one to repeat himself, Coppola took a radically different approach to
Rumble Fish
than he had employed on
The Outsiders
. The latter film was romantic melodrama along the lines of
The Godfather
, while he envisioned
Rumble Fish
as an art film, designed more in the direction of
Apocalypse Now
. Susie Hinton wrote the book five years after
The Outsiders
, when she was more mature, and, consequently, “it had tremendously impressive vision and dialogue and characters,” says Coppola.
²⁶
Stephen Farber records,
“Coppola actually co-wrote the screenplay. Mr. Coppola concentrated on structure and visual imagery, while Miss Hinton wrote all the dialogue. She found to her surprise that she had certain talents for screenwriting.”
²⁷

Hinton begins the novel in the present and then has Rusty-James narrate the story in flashback, a device she had likewise utilized in
The Outsiders
. Coppola rejected the flashback structure—which he had employed in his film of
The Outsiders
—for the movie version of
Rumble Fish
, presumably because he wanted to take a different approach to the material than he had taken in his previous Hinton film. Otherwise, the shooting script for
Rumble Fish
follows the novel quite faithfully. The screenplay, which is on file in the Script Repository of Universal Studios, the distributor of the film, is dated May 4, 1982.

Hinton mentions that every time she got a letter from a youngster who said
Rumble Fish
was his favorite novel the return address was invariably a reformatory. This is understandable, since the novel portrays youthful angst and rebellion even more frankly than
The Outsiders
.
Rumble Fish
has a darker, grittier quality than
The Outsiders
. Hence, Coppola chose to shoot it in black-and-white.

In concert with production designer Dean Tavoularis, Coppola chose location sites in Tulsa that were grimmer and grimier than those used in
The Outsiders
. He wanted locations marked by dampness and humidity in order to create the ambience of a desolate wasteland sweltering in the heat of high summer. Coppola asked Tavoularis, in his designing of the sets, to adapt at times the techniques of Expressionism from the Golden Age of German silent cinema. It is not my purpose to dwell in detail on the influence of expressionism on
Rumble Fish
, but the following observations are in order.

Expressionism sets itself against naturalism, with its mania for recording reality exactly as it is. Instead, the expressionistic artist seeks the symbolic meaning that underlies the facts. Foster Hirsch describes expressionism in film in the following terms: “German Expressionistic films were set in claustrophobic studio-created environments, where physical reality was distorted.” To be precise, expressionism exaggerated surface reality in order to make a symbolic point.
²⁸
Coppola employed one of the techniques of the old-time German expressionistic filmmakers by having Tavoularis paint forbidding shadows on the walls of the dark alleys in the tawdry slums in order to make them look more menacing. Thus, this is a tortured, moody motion picture, filled with fog and shadows.

Cinematographer Burum, working in concert with Coppola, made full use in
Rumble Fish
of expressionistic lighting, which lends itself so readily
to the moody atmosphere. Thus a sinister atmosphere was created in certain interiors by infusing them with menacing shadows looming on walls and ceilings, which gave a Gothic quality to faces. All in all, the black-and- white cinematography, with its night-shrouded streets and alleys, ominous corridors, and dark archways, gave this modestly budgeted feature a rich texture.

Nonetheless, Coppola insisted that expressionism be employed in the picture in only a few key scenes. After all, excessive use of expressionistic techniques in a commercial Hollywood movie would have seemed heavy-handed.

Motorcycle Boy, Rusty-James's burned-out older brother, is color-blind, due to the brain damage he has suffered in numerous fist fights and rumbles. His color-blindness is also a symbol of the disillusioned young man's view of the somber world in which he lives. This confirms Coppola's decision to shoot the movie in black-and-white, with a few judiciously chosen color overlays, as in the shots of the Siamese fighting fish that give the film its title. The rumble fish therefore serve as a metaphor for Motorcycle Boy, a colorful individual who is caught in drab, black-and-white surroundings.

Motorcycle Boy's vision of life permeates the film, and that clearly justifies the black-and-white photography. The contrast between the color cinematography of
The Outsiders
and the black-and-white photography of
Rumble Fish
brings into relief how different Coppola intended his two teen gang movies to be in style and concept. It was crucial for him, he declares, to draw a clear distinction between the two films since he was employing the same production crew and same location for both movies.
The Outsiders
was a blueprint in color of a story about juvenile delinquents, while
Rumble Fish
was its negative in stark black-and-white, a film about deeply disaffected and alienated youngsters.

Although the production team included Coppola regulars like Tavoularis and editor Barry Malkin, Francis Coppola did not call once more upon Carmine Coppola to compose the score for the present film. The director instead opted to have a background score that relied heavily on percussion and so commissioned Stewart Copeland, the American drummer for the British rock band the Police, to provide the score. Copeland did principally use percussion for the background music for the film, but he also recorded Tulsa street sounds—such as traffic noises, police and ambulance sirens—and wove them into his score, which included not only drums but a piano and a xylophone. Coppola believes that percussion instruments are exciting in themselves, so he encouraged Copeland to use percussion alone in certain scenes. The rumble at the beginning of the movie seemed
to be a perfect place for a percussion solo, which, in the context of the scene, sounds very sinister and ominous. Copeland's spare percussive score was as far removed as it could be from the saccharinity that sometimes marked Carmine Coppola's music for
The Outsiders
.

After demonstrating that he could make a mainstream Hollywood commercial film like
The Outsiders
, Coppola set out to confirm his status as a Hollywood maverick by conceiving
Rumble Fish
as a picture that audaciously departed from the conventions of a routine genre picture. Shooting the film in grainy black-and-white, with an avant-garde score, set
Rumble Fish
apart from the usual Hollywood output.

Two of the lead actors in
The Outsiders
reappear in
Rumble Fish:
Matt Dillon was signed to play Rusty-Jones and Diane Lane (who played Cherry, the girl with whom the Matt Dillon character had a brief flirtation in
The Outsiders
) would be Patty, Rusty-James's girl in
Rumble Fish
. Mickey Rourke, who had auditioned for
The Outsiders
, was selected to play Motorcycle Boy. From
Apocalypse Now
, Coppola re-called Dennis Hopper as the drunken father of Rusty-James and Motorcycle Boy and Larry Fishburne as a member of a rival gang, called Midget because he is so tall. Finally, Vincent Spano took the part of Steve, Rusty-James's naive but likeable sidekick. The swarthy actor peroxided his hair in order to lose the darkly handsome look he had as a teenage heartthrob in previous teen films.

Coppola spent two weeks videotaping rehearsals for
Rumble Fish
in the school gym where he had rehearsed the cast of
The Outsiders
. He encouraged the young actors at times to improvise dialogue containing the profanity that lower-class boys ordinarily employed. Once again he taped a final run-through of the whole script, which served as a “previsualization” of the film. He then screened it for the cast and crew to get their reactions.

Principal photography could not begin until Coppola had secured a distributor who would put up some front money for
Rumble Fish
. Warner Brothers bowed out because they were not interested in releasing a second youth picture on the heels of
The Outsiders
that might compete with it. By the end of June, Coppola had cut a distribution deal with Universal, with release set for the fall of 1983. Filming accordingly started on July 12,1982, only a few weeks after the production phase of
The Outsiders
was finished.

Steven Burum, in consultation with Coppola, often employed flat, harsh lighting to give the movie a stark and brutal look. He photographed some scenes with an unsteady hand-held camera: “We wanted,” he said, “to give people a feeling of uneasiness,” that there is something off-kilter in the unstable world in which the kids live.
²⁹